pronunciation

my love of Pragma Bakker's work extends far beyond my grasp of the pronunciation of ...well, a lot of the names found in Earwa (ear-wha?) however, i've noticed that most of you fine folk here are pretty damn smart so i'm asking if anyone can point to an existing pronunciation guide or perhaps indulge me with a little tutoring. (like the Nonman Tutelage minus me later ransacking your mansion afterwards)

I mentioned that I default to the Latin pronounciation (specifically, reconstructed ancient Latin, because I'm a snob like that), since Bakker doesn't really offer any definite guide for his world. The following treatise is a good start for various channels of Latin pronunciation, including emphasis: http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/latinpro.pdf

I thought that getting the audiobooks would help me with a lot of the pronunciations, but so many of them sounded different from what I imagined, I don't know. Then I got the audiobooks for TJE and WLW and the new reader pronounced things differently still. Once someone asked Bakker about the audiobooks on 3lb brain and his response seemed to say that he wasn't very involved with their production. So...all that is to say that the audiobooks have not solved the pronunciation thing for me.

I think there was a pretty good thread on zombie three seas, with cunning linguist academic types. I will try and find it later.

*edit*

Here we are.I think Carlsfini and Cnaiur provide some pretty good information about pronunciation, but you'll have to sort through a lot of formatting garbage from quoted previous posts.

And a relevant quote from RSB:

Quote

Actually, pronunciation questions are the one's I get asked the most, and people are always surprised when I tell them there is no canonical pronunciation as far as I'm concerned (as is the case with most dead languages). I use diacritics to break up some dipthongs and to mark most long u's, but not much otherwise. Hopefully, I'll have the time to go through my notes and outline the phonetics of some of the major language groups. But then I've been saying that for several years now...

EDIT [Madness]: Just fixed your link. You had double http:// after the = and you don't need " " for enclosing URLs here, only spoiler or quote attributions.

Since the thread in Westeros is going to die eventually, I want to post it here too:

Quote from: Triskan

Two that drive me crazy (and this has come up before) because unlike Nayu it's not that clear are Celmomas and Cishaurim.

Is it Selmo or Kelmo?

And like our podcasters, I'd always thought it was Sishaurim until my monkey brain made the connection with the Tribe of Indara-Kishauri which made me think it's Kishaurim.

Quote from: .H.

I always felt like it was Selmo, but that is entirely unfounded.

The Indara-Kishauri observation is incredibly good, however, I believe it proves the opposite. In other words, Cishaurim is clearly derived from Kishauri, so by spelling it with a C instead of the K should signify some difference. My guess is it is a corruption somewhere in the line of the Shemic languages. Most probably in the line of Caro-Shemic to Kianni, although possibly as far back as Proto-Caro-Shemic.

Then again, I am no linguistic expert by any stretch of the imagination.

Quote from: Triskan

I've always pronounced Inchoroi as having a "ch" like church, but then it occurred to me that in my mind I say Chorae as if it's koray rather than chore-ay. Why I should be inconsistent on that I cannot say.

ETA: That's a good point; maybe it is Sishaurim after all.

Quote from: .H.

SilentRoamer is the master of this, but he correctly identified the -roi suffix should remain consistent across Inchoroi, Halaroi and Cūnuroi. Here we are left to assume that these words are in Ihrimsū.

The problem is if the name Chorae is Gilcūnya, or is the name Chorae the Ihrimsū name for them?

My hunch is that the two should actually be different.

Logged

I am a warrior of ages, Anasūrimbor . . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cetingira

I always thought of it like language evolving and/or being absorbed from one culture to another. Like how Ancient Greek was adopted into so many 'newer' languages. Sensibilities change over time and regarding differing cultural history. Where a Greek may have spelled the word 'apokįlypsis', later cultures adapted that to 'apocalypse.' Spelled differently, but with the same sounds, just adapted and modernized. That's why I think Cishaurim is 'kish-ow-rim' (because of Indara-Kishauri) and Celmomas is 'kel-mo-mas' since we have Kelmomas who is obviously named after Celmomas. TBH, I thought it was 'kel-mo-mas' long before we were introduced to Kelmomas. Try reading that shit out of context. lol Similarly, Ciphrang to me is 'kif-rang' because of the Fanim name kurkifra.